To Unmake The Ruin
by Donavon L Riley
We twist our longing for God into idols, yet Christ enters our wreckage—not to affirm but to redeem—crafting wholeness from our brokenness and calling us to step into the daring simplicity of being made new. — D.
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We wander through a wilderness where confusion wears the face of freedom, blind to the wounds we hold as if they were medals. The vessel God shaped—the clay warmed by His breath—is cracked, discarded in a feverish chase for an imagined liberation. How bitterly we’ve twisted our longing for Him, refashioning it into an idol made from our own flesh. We stumble between two great abysses: the silence too timid to name sin, and the clamor that names but refuses to mend. Scripture will not bow to either. Its voice cuts, sure and steady, refusing the lies of timidity and cruelty.
The book of Leviticus carves our boundaries like winter frost biting through stone. St. Paul also speaks of dishonored bodies, vessels shattered, nature bent inward and broken. Yet here, in the wreckage, strides Christ—not with soft approval, not to anoint our fractured reflections, but with hands scarred and open. He walks among the ruins of our illusions, not to affirm but to save. His voice, like a north wind through blighted growth, doesn’t flatter the rot; it burns, stripping away the leaves to lay the soul bare.
Beneath every mask we wear, every proud challenge of “Did God really say?” lies a deeper wound—raw, hidden, and bleeding. No scalpel can seal it, no parade sanctify its ache. Yet here is the scandal of Christ: He comes not just to scatter the idols but to gather their fragments. In His hands, even the broken becomes a vessel for mercy. He does not come to applaud us “as we are,” but to strike the lie and draw out what waits beneath—to unmake the ruin and reveal its hidden promise.
And so, everything changes. Christ lifts the shards of our false selves—the wreckage we thought too jagged to ever be whole—and, with the fire of His cross, crafts a genius we could never claim. It is not our work but His, not our wholeness but His remaking. What else is left for us but to let go of the old claims, to unbind ourselves from the idols of self-making, and step forward into the daring simplicity of His making us new?
D.